Public schools are a safety net in the community.
Because when corporate charter schools close – and they do close all the time – kids and parents are the ones who are hurt.
Since 2021, nearly 2,000 students in Western New York have been affected by charter school shutdowns.
Those shutdowns follow similar symptoms: student retention, teacher turnover and poor academic achievement.
“Student retention was a problem as well; nearly a third of the students who first enrolled… in 2012 had left by 2016,” said a Democrat Chronicle article about a Rochester charter school that closed in 2017. “Perhaps the biggest problem was teacher turnover. In its first four years, it never had more than 40 percent of its teachers remain from one year to the next,” the article continued.
Examples of charter school closures:
